RealGM Wiretap

Masai Ujiri: Our Job Is To Beat LeBron James

Jul 27, 2017 11:34 AM

The Toronto Raptors kept part of their core together this offseason in re-signing Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka, though they lost DeMarre Carroll, Cory Joseph, Patrick Patterson and P.J. Tucker. Toronto acquired C.J. Miles in the Joseph trade.

Masai Ujiri's moves were with LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in mind.

“Our job is to beat him,” Ujiri recently told The Vertical. “You have to figure it out. If not, then go play in some other league or something. Go play in Greece. Our jobs, and the jobs of the players, [are] to figure out how to beat those guys. If not, you might as well give them the championship before it starts. I understand how good he is and I understand how good those teams are, but those things end. At some point, somewhere, somehow, we as leaders of our group, we have to figure out a way and motivate our players and give them the confidence to go out there and compete.”

Toronto was swept by the Cavaliers in the second round of the playoffs.

“I don’t think we took a step back. I don’t like making excuses, but many things didn’t line up well. That was not a good feel,” Ujiri told The Vertical. “There’s no excuses for us. Cleveland was better than us at the time, so we have to regroup, come back and try to get a training camp out of it and grow from there. … There were times when our team was a little funky and we couldn’t get it together. You have to dig in-depth and find out what went wrong, and some of it, I think, it was complacency sometimes. Sometimes, it was chemistry. And sometimes, it was our style of play. Sometimes, it was us, individually. When we go back to the drawing board and address those issues with everybody, and everybody figures out, ‘This is what I didn’t do so well,’ and, ‘This is what we didn’t do so well.'”